How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"

By Matthew Lasar

It was 1879, and investor Charles A. Sumner sat at his desk, frustration pouring onto the page through his ink pen. Sumner, business partner to the radical economist and journalist Henry George, was finishing the concluding passages of a book about what had happened to the telegraph, or the Victorian Internet, as one historian calls it.

"This glorious invention was vouchsafed to mankind," he wrote, "that we might salute and converse with one another respectively stationed at remote and isolated points for a nominal sum."

But instead, he continued, "A wicked monopoly has seized hold of this beneficent capacity and design, and made it tributary, by exorbitant tariffs, to a most miserly and despicable greed."

It's a largely forgotten story, but one that still has relevance today. If you follow debates about broadband policy, you know that there are two perspectives perennially at war with each other. One seeks some regulation of the dominant industries and service providers of our time. The other seeks carte blanche for the private sector to do as it sees fit. Nowhere does the latter camp press this case harder than when it comes to network neutrality on the Internet, and appeals to the Founding Fathers aren't unknown.

"Our founding fathers understood that it is government that takes away people's freedoms, not individuals or companies," wrote entrepreneur Scott Cleland in an opinion piece for National Public Radio not long ago. Cleland opposes the Federal Communications Commission's proposals to codify into rules its principles prohibiting ISPs from discriminating against certain applications.

"At the core, the FCC's proposed pre-emptive 'net neutrality' regulations to preserve an 'open Internet' are not at all about promoting freedom but exactly the opposite. Freedom is not a zero sum game, where taking it away from some gives more to others. Taking away freedoms of some takes away freedom from all."

Reading this argument, one wonders if there ever was an age when the hands-off school of regulation got exactly what it seems to want—a network environment largely untarnished by public oversight.

In fact, there was such a time.
Hayessociated Press

Rutherford Hayes


Three years before Sumner wrote his lament, the country was wracked by the most convulsive presidential election since the outbreak of the Civil War: Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York versus Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. The Republican party had split between loyalists to the administration of Ulysses S. Grant and those appalled by its corruption. In truth, the resurgent Democrats were no better when it came to civic virtue, but they lured some Republicans away with Tilden, who famously battled bribery and graft as governor of New York.

When, on that November night in 1876, the popular results indicated a narrow majority for the reform candidate, many assumed the first Democratic victory in two decades. But not so at one of the Associated Press's most prestigious affiliates, the ardently pro-Republican New York Times. When prominent Democrats nervously contacted the Times asking for an update on the results, its managing editor John Reid realized that the election was still in doubt. He contacted top Republican party officials and had them spread the word via telegram—the electoral college votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were still in play.

It was easy for these men to access the telegraph system, because its main operator, Western Union, was also militantly pro-Republican. During the long controversy in Congress over who actually won the districts in the disputed election of 1876, Western Union secretly siphoned to AP's general agent Henry Nash Smith the telegraph correspondence of key Democrats during the struggle. Smith, in turn, relayed this intelligence to the Hayes camp with instructions on how to proceed. On top of that, AP constantly published propaganda supporting the Republican side of the story. Meanwhile, Western Union insisted that it kept "all messages whatsoever . . . strictly private and confidential."

Tilden supporters weren't fooled. By the end of the debacle—Hayes having won the White House—they called AP "Hayessociated Press."
The great giveaway

A Union Pacific advertisement


It was no secret why Western Union sided with Republicans. By the 1870s, the Party of Lincoln (Abe himself being a former railroad lawyer) had given away massive quantities of land for the construction of railroads and telegraphs: almost 130 million acres (about seven percent of the continental United States) was granted to eighty enterprises. Although the telegraph had been pioneered by Samuel Morse in the 1840s, the innovation didn't really take off, economically speaking, until it partnered with the railroads, at which point it became the Victorian era's version of our information superhighway.

The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 sped up the construction of a coast-to-coast railroad system, and it further subsidized telegraph growth as well. But Congress provided very little regulation or oversight for the largesse.

The result was the infamous Credit Mobilier scandal of the 1870s, a scheme that bears some resemblance to the Enron debacle of 2001. Rather than license the construction of the Union Pacific railroad to an independent contractor, its Board of Directors farmed the work out to Credit Mobilier, a company that was, essentially, themselves. In turn, Credit billed the UP vastly more than the actual cost of the project. To keep Congress quiet about the affair, the firm offered stock in itself to Representatives and Senators of any political persuasion at bargain basement prices.

In this context, it should come as no surprise that the nation's telegraph system quickly fell into the hands of one of the most notorious schemers of the Gilded Age.


Mephistopheles

Jay Gould


This schemer's name was Jay Gould. Railroad stock speculator and ally of corrupt politicians like William Marcy "Boss" Tweed of New York, by the late 1860s Gould had become infamous for his attempt to manipulate the nation's gold supply, which backfired in the stunning "Black Friday" financial panic of 1869.

A decade later, with his interest in scores of railroads, Gould saw that "the telegraph and the railroad systems go hand in hand," as he put it. But the Board of Western Union refused to have anything to do with him. And so Gould, armed with his own newspaper, The New York World, set out to conquer the telegraph service via financial hijinks and public pressure. First he organized a bear raid on the company, lowering the value of its stock. Then he constructed several smaller telegraph firms and denounced Western Union as an unscrupulous monopoly.

By 1881, Gould had not only sold his competing companies to Western Union, but he successfully pulled down the price of Western Union shares to the point where he could easily buy out the enterprise. So proud was he of his conquest that he personally relocated to Western Union's corporate HQ—"a massive, bomb proof citadel" and a "gloomy pile, six stories high, costing $2,200,000," as the Gilded Age historian Matthew Josephson described it. "Here Gould's person at least was safe. For the pitiless tactics he pursued were not such as to make him immune from physical danger."

Once installed as the dominant proprietor of the nation's telegraph system, public trust in the confidentiality of Western Union transmissions evaporated. Gould "scanned the telegraph, or manipulated it, as an open book to the secrets of all the marts," Josephson wrote.

No one could ever demonstrate that, in fact, Gould read the telegraphic correspondence of his competitors and enemies. But that would have been difficult to expose, given Western's already corrupt relationship with Associated Press.
Never encourage or support

The old Western Union headquarters in New York


Two years after the conclusion of the Civil War, the two biggest competing telegraph news services—Western Associated Press and New York Associated Press—effectively merged with a joint executive board. (Note that, at the time, the "Western" Associated Press included newspapermen from St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis.)

The duo then cut a deal with telegraph operator Western Union. In exchange for exclusive access to Western Union, both APs promised never to "encourage or support any opposition or competing Telegraph Company." In turn, newspapers that subscribed to AP pledged to use AP only. And no new newspaper could join the news cartel without the support of current AP members in the region.

Thus, "if a newspaper publicly criticized the AP, it risked losing its membership," notes the historian Paul Starr. "Not only, therefore, did AP itself enjoy a monopoly position; its member newspapers could also protect themselves against local competition." When Gould finally sold his unprofitable New York World to Joseph Pulitzer, the latter paid Gould's exorbitant asking price because of the outlet's invaluable AP franchise.

And so Associated Press and Western Union effectively created a criticism-proof information system that married content creation with a national network, and in which few competitors could surface. When Sumner's partner Henry George tried to start a paper in San Francisco in 1879, the AP refused to sell him a franchise. He then relocated to Philadelphia to start his own news company, but Western Union cut him off from the West's only telegraph cable. His and Sumner's investment collapsed.
Second, the public

All this mischief was an open secret. "Western Union has bound the Associated Press," concluded an 1874 United States Senate investigation, "as part of the price paid for the transmission of its news, to oppose any other telegraph company, and then points to the columns of the papers as evidence that neither the journals themselves nor the public desire a change."

Summoned to a hearing in the House of Representatives, Western Union's President brushed these concerns aside. "The mere fact of monopoly proves nothing," he declared. "The only question to be considered is, whether those who control its affairs administer them properly and in the interest, first, of the owners of the property, and second, of the public."

A Western Union telegram from 1874. Read the content to remember what a wild place the West could be


The Senate held yet another inquiry about Western's telegraph shenanigans following the "Stolen Election of 1876," as it was called. The investigation was presided over by a Republican. "The telegrams, which the Democrats were never able to review, were kept for two months, returned to Western Union, and destroyed," writes Starr, save for some that discredited Tilden. That year the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment guarded the confidentiality of the postal mails... but the decision did not extend to the telegraph.

For the next decade, every flavor of social reformer called for a government-subsidized competitor to Western Union, especially the Populist Party. In addition to Western Union's cozy relationship with AP, critics complained of high rates. So did the conservative National Board of Trade. By 1890, even prominent Republicans such as department store magnate John Wanamaker joined the chorus. "That man must be willfully blind who does not see the vast and rising tide of public sentiment against monopoly," he warned.

But the collapse of the Populists after the election of 1896 and Western Union's enormous political power kept this reform movement at bay. Not until 1910 did Congress clearly define both the telephone and telegraph as common carriers. By then many newspapers had glommed onto a new service: Marconi's wireless telegraph.
Then and now

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure.

Sure enough, the technologies and debates are different. Still, one wonders what Charles A. Sumner would say today if told that net neutrality is a "solution to a problem that hasn't happened yet."

This Is The Police: Put Down Your Camera

by Joel Rose

Morning Edition

[4 min 5 sec]

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There are more than 280 million cellphone subscribers in the U.S., and many of those phones can record video. With so many cameras in pockets and purses, clashes between police and would-be videographers may be inevitable.

Consider what happened to Khaliah Fitchette. Last year, Fitchette, who was 16 at the time, was riding a city bus in Newark, N.J., when two police officers got on to deal with a man who seemed to be drunk. Fitchette decided this would be a good moment to take out her phone and start recording.

"One of the officers told me to turn off my phone, because I was recording them," she said. "I said no. And then she grabbed me and pulled me off the bus to the cop car, which was behind the bus."

The police erased the video from Fitchette's phone. She was handcuffed and spent the next two hours in the back of a squad car before she was released. No charges were filed.

Fitchette is suing the Newark Police Department for violating her civil rights. The New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union helped bring the lawsuit.

"All of us, as we walk around, have to understand that we could be filmed, we could be taped," says Deborah Jacobs, director of the ACLU chapter. "But police officers above all others should be subject to this kind of filming because we have a duty to hold them accountable as powerful public servants."

The Newark Police Department did not return calls for comment. But Newark is not the only department that has tried to discourage its citizens from filming on-duty cops.

'Resistant To Change'

In a video from 2010, a state trooper in Maryland flashed his gun while pulling over motorcyclist Anthony Graber for speeding. When Graber posted the video from his helmet cam on YouTube, prosecutors charged him with breaking the state's wiretapping law because he recorded the trooper's voice without consent. A judge dismissed the case. But that hasn't changed the opinion of some in the law enforcement community who say video recording is potentially dangerous for cops.

"They need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be," says Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police.

"We feel that anything that's going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving — an apprehension that he's being videotaped and may be made to look bad — could cost him or some citizen their life," Pasco says, "or some serious bodily harm."

Anthony Graber gets pulled over for speeding by a Maryland state trooper. The motorcyclist was charged with violating the state's wiretapping law after posting this video of the incident. The case was dismissed.

Tom Nolan, a former Boston police officer, says police have to get used to the world of cameras everywhere. "There's always going to be a pocket of police officers who are resistant to change," he says. "But I think the vast majority of police have been acclimated to the reality that what they're doing is likely being recorded at any given time."

Nolan now teaches at Boston University. He says police in Massachusetts train their officers to tolerate video recording, as long as no other crime is taking place.

And Nolan thinks departments around the country will eventually do the same.

"The police will get the message when municipal governments and police departments have got to write out substantial settlement checks," he says. "Standing by itself, that video camera in the hands of some teenager is not going to constitute sufficient grounds for a lawful arrest."

Khaliah Fitchette's lawyers in New Jersey say her detention was illegal. But Fitchette still says she'd think twice before filming police in Newark again.

"It would have to be important enough to get myself in trouble for, I guess," she says.

She has this attitude, Fitchette says, because she thinks she could get in trouble again, even though her detention was allegedly unlawful.

But the legality of filming is, ultimately, a question the courts will have to answer. Because no one expects teenagers — or the rest of us — to stop shooting video with our phones.

File-Sharers Await Official Recognition of New Religion

A group of self-confessed radical pirates are pinning their hopes on gaining official recognition of their own unique belief system. The founders of the Missionary Church of Kopimism – who hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – hope that along with this acceptance will come harmony, not just with each other, but also with the police.

‘Thou shall not steal’ is one of the most well-known of the Ten Commandments. Although most familiar to those in Christian circles, its message is universal and cuts across most religious boundaries. But while stealing – taking another’s property and therefore depriving him of it – is widely frowned upon, some have a wider definition for the word.

Make no mistake, if the entertainment industries were God passing their sacred rulings to Moses, there would have almost certainly been one more – Thou Shalt Not Copy. But for the followers of a brand new religion in Sweden, this commandment would be against everything they believe in.

The congregation at Missionary Kopimistsamfundet – The Missionary Church of Kopimism – believe that copying is to be embraced by religion and they hope that very shortly this way of life will be officially accepted by the authorities.


Founded by 19-year-old philosophy student, Isaac Gerson, this brand new church believes that copying and the sharing of information is the most beautiful thing in the world. To have your information copied is a token of appreciation, say the church, a sure sign that people think you have done something good.

For those thinking this is some kind of late April Fool’s joke, think again.

In late 2010 the church applied to the authorities to be accepted as an official religion. That application was denied at the end of March on the basis that although the church is indeed a community, its meetings did not constitute ‘worship’. Undeterred, the church founders have requested a meeting to find out what is required in order to gain official acceptance. They certainly aren’t giving in.

“Throughout history, various groups around the world have been persecuted by oppressors. They have since taken refuge in religion with a desire for a peaceful coexistence. Without threats and harassment,” the church explain.

“In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people. Absolute secrecy is holy in the Church of Kopimism.”

The church has its own set of axioms, most of which revolve around free access to knowledge and the sharing of information. They include:

• Reproduction of information is ethically right.
• The flow of information is ethically right.
• Remix Spirit is a sacred kind of copying.
• Copying or remixing information conveyed by another person is an act of respect

The church is also acutely against DRM and other methods of protecting or hiding code.

“To appropriate software (to keep source code hidden from others), is comparable to slavery, and should be banned,” they declare.

Perhaps predictably the church use the ‘Kopimi’ logo (a pyramid with the letter K inside) as their official symbol and hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred.

Joining the church seems fairly easy too. All you have to do is agree that everything should be copied and information should be free in line with the axioms above, then load the church’s website so that the ‘kopimi’ logo refreshes (or indeed draw it, or copy it in any way) and you’re in. Potential followers can request more information by using the online form here.

In common with many other religions around the world, expect the followers of the Missionary Church of Kopimism to be widely persecuted for their beliefs. Praying they don’t get caught while practising them will offer little protection. After all, even the Pope backs up his faith with bullet-proof glass.

Billings Best Buy employee loses job for stopping store theft

By GREG TUTTLE


JAMES WOODCOCK/Gazette Staff Roger Kline describes the events that led to his termination from Best Buy after he tackled a man who was running from the store with stolen computers.


It was a split-second decision that cost Roger Kline his job.

Until Tuesday, the 51-year-old Kline worked in the computer department at Best Buy in Billings. He had held the sales job for over three years, he said, and was among the store's top performers without so much as a blemish on his employment record.

"I believe I was one of the highest-regarded employees there," he said.

But Kline ran into problems on March 28 when a would-be thief tried to run out of the store with two laptop computers.

Kline said his instincts took over, and instead of letting the man dash away without paying for the $1,600 in merchandise, Kline grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

The man, 45-year-old Brent Carter Latendresse, was arrested and has been charged in Yellowstone County District Court with felony theft and misdemeanor drug possession.

Latendresse is awaiting trial. Kline said he is taking a few weeks off before looking for a new job.

"Everybody is asking the exact same question," Kline said about his firing. "The problem is, I don't have an answer because the decision had nothing to do with morals."

A spokeswoman for Best Buy said the company could not comment.

The crime

According to court records, the incident at the West End store began when the manager heard an emergency alarm sound on a back door. The manager said he saw a man carrying two boxed laptops running from the back door toward another door at the loading area.

That door was locked, so the thief dashed back through the store headed for the front doors.

As the man neared the front doors, he tripped, falling face first into the glass. Court records state that the man was held until police arrived.

Kline has a similar account, with a few additional details.

Kline said he was standing near the front doors when he heard the store manager announce on the speaker system that someone was running through the store trying to steal laptops.

Kline saw the running man and began to move toward the front doors. The man fell before he made it out of the store, slamming into the floor and the first set of glass doors.

That gave Kline enough time to get outside the second set of doors just as the man tried to make his final escape.

Kline described his next act as a "spontaneous thing."

"As he stood up, I grabbed a hold of him and threw him to the ground," he said.

Kline landed on top of the man and intended to hold him there until police arrived.

But the store manager approached and told Kline to back off.

"Roger, you have to let him go," Kline said he was told.

Kline followed his boss's direction, while an unidentified customer took Kline's place and held Latendresse until a police officer arrived.

Kline said he didn't have time to think before he grabbed the fleeing thief, but he recalls clearly how he felt at the time.

"Someone steals from you, you stop them," he said. "That's the way I was brought up. I felt like the guy was stealing from me, not just the company. I guess I took it a little personal when I saw the guy run out of the store with two computers."

The fallout

Kline says he knew better than to interfere with a crime-in-progress. It is against company policy at Best Buy to intervene in such cases. Kline said he accurately described his actions in a written statement he was asked to give by his boss the same day.

He was told that his actions would be reviewed.

Kline said he knew he could be fired for doing what he felt was right despite the policy. He even agreed to amend his statement to include the fact that he was aware of the company policy against such actions.

Then days days stretched into weeks without word.

"They had me in a holding pattern for a month," he said. "I was going to work every day just to greet the manager to see if I had a job because no one said anything to me about the whole process."

Kline said he did speak to someone about the incident by telephone, but he's not sure whom he talked to. He thinks it may have been someone from a company hired by Best Buy to investigate incidents.

After three weeks passed, Kline said, he sent an email to his boss asking about the status of his employment. He was told that a member of the company's review committee had taken some time off, but that a decision was expected soon.

Then on Tuesday, Kline was called into the manager's office and handed an "involuntary separation notice."

"Roger, you admitted that on March 28, 2011, you pursued a shoplifter and engaged in physical force to apprehend this shoplifter," the one-page notice reads. "This is a violation of Best Buy's Inappropriate Conduct Policy which states that employees are prohibited from 'pursuing shoplifters under any circumstance or using physical force to detain shoplifters' and ground for termination. Your employment with Best Buy is terminated, effective immediately."

Losing his job was hard, Kline said, but he does not blame his former boss, who he said was just doing his job.

But waiting a month to learn his fate from a committee of people he had never met or spoken with was hard.

"I'm more twisted because they took so long to make the decision," he said.

Perceived vs. actual country rankings

Bruce Schneider - Reconceptualizing Security

This may be the most important video you ever watch.

Brazilian police to use 'Robocop-style' glasses at World Cup

Brazilian police will use futuristic 'Robocop-style' glasses fitted with facial recognition equipment to identify and root out troublemakers at the 2014 World Cup.

By Robin Yapp

A small camera fitted to the glasses can capture 400 facial images per second and send them to a central computer database storing up to 13 million faces.

The system can compare biometric data at 46,000 points on a face and will immediately signal any matches to known criminals or people wanted by police.

If there is a match a red signal will appear on a small screen connected to the glasses, alerting the police officer of the need to take further action or make an arrest.


The devices will soon be tested at football matches and concerts and police in Brazil, South America's biggest country, are already planning to use them during the next World Cup.

The camera will generally be used to scan faces in crowds up to 50 metres (164ft) away but can be adjusted, if searching for a specific target, to recognise faces as far as 12 miles away.

Military Police officials from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which will both host key games in the World Cup, have been given demonstrations of how the device works.

Major Leandro Pavani Agostini, of Sao Paulo's Military Police, said: "It's something discreet because you do not question the person or ask for documents. The computer does it.

"To the naked eye two people may appear identical but with 46,000 points compared, the data will not be beaten."

He said the device will be useful to police trying to monitor many different locations and events, ranging from airports and bus terminals to concerts and football matches.

"I can insert into the database a supporter who was involved in a brawl on the field and even with the old images, he can be located in the future," added the Major.

Robocop, the American film of 1987, told the story of a police officer who was killed by criminals but re-created as a cyborg with an array of weaponry and built-in zoom vision.

House votes to direct $100M in taxpayer dollars to religious private schools

by: Mike Daniels

Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives (many of whom were elected on promises of cost-cutting and budget-slashing) voted to direct $100M of your taxpayer dollars to prop up private religious schools in Washington, DC.

In a 225 to 195 vote, the House approved H.R. 471, the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act. This legislation reauthorizes and expands the Washington, D.C. Federal private school voucher pilot program, under which millions of Federal taxpayer dollars — $100M per year over the next five years — are funneled into a voucher system which favors private religious schools over public and charter schools.
More than 80 percent of students in the D.C. voucher program attend private religious schools, which, under this program, are allowed to discriminate in hiring and enrollment on the basis of religion.

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

Church-state separatists and proponents of religious liberty were up in arms.
“This legislation is a blatant violation of the separation of church and state,” said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. “The D.C. voucher program uses millions of American taxpayer dollars to fund the religious training of thousands of District students who attend private, religious institutions that do not offer students an op-out option and are exempt from federal civil rights laws.”
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize religious proselytizing and discrimination,” Faircloth continued. “We urge the U.S. Senate to reject this legislation on the grounds that it is unjust and unconstitutional.”
“Speaker Boehner says we’re broke and have to slash federal spending,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Yet, he’s willing to throw $20 million [per year] at religious and other private schools.”
Added Lynn, “This voucher scheme undermines public education and church-state separation.”
K. Hollyn Hollman, General Counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, explains why the BJC opposes vouchers. “While we affirm the right of parents to choose a religious education for their children, we oppose using public funds to support religion. Religious teachings should be funded by voluntary contributions, not through compulsory taxation. Voucher programs that provide tuition to religious schools violate the freedom of conscience of taxpayers who have the right to insist that the government remain neutral in matters of religion.”
Hollman continues with a related point which many organizations overlook. “In addition, government funding of religious education tends to jeopardize the autonomy of religious schools, bringing regulations or political pressures that threaten the schools’ religious character.”

Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?

Hollman points out another serious problem with the program. “[Both a GAO study and a private study mandated by Congress] found various problems and little evidence of improved education. Specifically, the studies found that the participants did not come from the schools that were most in need of improvement, many schools that accepted voucher students did not meet accreditation and other quality education standards, and student achievement did not show statistically significant improvement.”
Is Speaker Boehner thinking of the children, or the voting blocs?

Home Rule?

When the program was created in 2004, it had the support of DC’s Democratic leadership. Today, DC’s Democratic mayor, and its non-voting Delegate in the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton, speak vehemently against extending the failed subsidy instead of directing funds to DC’s beleaguered public schools.
“Home rule means nothing if the District of Columbia can still be a dumping ground for every pet idea and pet project of the majority,” Norton said.
President Obama released a statement Tuesday strongly opposing the D.C. voucher program and urging Representatives to vote against it. The White House memo cited the Department of Education-commissioned study — indicating that minimal improvement in student performance had been observed with the program — as evidence that the program was a failure.
Obama stopped short of threatening a veto, suggesting his characteristic willingness to compromise.
The bill will now head to the U.S. Senate. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is a sponsor, which effectively ensures it will pass the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs . . . chaired by Lieberman. Whether it will pass the full Senate remains to be seen.

More Information: The Studies

Evaluation of the Impact of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Final Report (2010)
This is the report commissioned by the Department of Education.
Full report (PDF)
Executive Summary (PDF)
From the Executive Summary:

There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP affected student achievement. On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships (figure ES-2). The same pattern of results holds for students who applied from schools in need of improvement (SINI), the group Congress designated as the highest priority for the Program. Although some other subgroups of students appeared to have higher levels of reading achievement if they were offered or used a scholarship, those findings could be due to chance. They should be interpreted with caution since the results were no longer significant after applying a statistical test to account for multiple comparisons of treatment and control group members across the subgroups.

The program also did raise graduation rates among those who received scholarships by 12%, but their competencies (as noted above) did not improve. They merely didn’t drop out. (Speculation on my part — Because Mom and Dad were now paying partial tuition, and motivated to keep Junior in school?)
Also, the program raised parents’, but NOT students’ ratings of school safety and satisfaction.
The report also covers reasons why scholarships were not used. Primarily, they were not used because there was inadequate space at the preferred private school or the child was accepted in a (public) charter school.
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA OPPORTUNITY SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM (GAO, 2007)
Full report (PDF, 98 pages)
Highlights (PDF, 1 page)
From the Highlights:

We found that WSF did not adhere to its own procedures for making scholarship payments, and WSF’s use of OSP funds to pay tuition for students attending schools that do not normally charge students tuition is not in accordance with the Act. Additionally, on the basis of a lack of documentation about whether before-and-after care included academic support, GAO was unable to determine if use of OSP funds to pay these fees was in accordance with the Act.
Despite recruitment efforts and efforts to inform parents of their choices, WSF faced challenges recruiting students from schools designated as in need of improvement, ensuring private school quality and placement opportunities, and providing parents with accurate information regarding private schools. Students who were offered scholarships generally reported income consistent with OSP’s financial eligibility standards, but, among students offered scholarships, students from schools in need of improvement were underrepresented relative to their presence in the population of District students. Although most private schools in the District officially participated in the program, the schools varied widely in the number of openings available to scholarship students, and few openings were available at the secondary level. The characteristics of participating schools varied, and some schools did not meet basic requirements to operate in the District, but the information WSF provided to parents to help them choose schools for children was not always complete and correct.

Emphasis added.
Note: WSF (Washington Scholarship Fund) was the vendor selected to operate the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Related articles:

1. Taxpayer Tithes: House Speaker uses budget deal to fund religious schools with your tax dollars
2. Take Action: Tell Congress to stop Federal funding of religious schools
3. ACTION ALERT: Bill Seeks to Restore Voucher Scheme, Taxpayer Subsidy for Religious Schools
4. Americans United chastises U.S. House for vote in favor of $100 Million private school voucher scheme
5. D.C. school vouchers: President Obama urges House to vote no

Seeing without looking

 

During the motion discrimination task the test subjects had to fixate their gaze at the square in the middle while reporting the direction of movement in the red circle. Credit: Image: Courtesy of Lee Lovejoy, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Like a spotlight that illuminates an otherwise dark scene, attention brings to mind specific details of our environment while shutting others out. A new study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies shows that the superior colliculus, a brain structure that primarily had been known for its role in the control of eye and head movements, is crucial for moving the mind's spotlight.

Their findings, published in the Dec. 20, 2009, issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, add new insight to our understanding of how attention is controlled by the brain. The results are closely related to a neurological disorder known as the neglect syndrome, and they may also shed light on the origins of other disorders associated with chronic attention problems, such as autism or attention deficit disorder.

"Our ability to survive in the world depends critically on our ability to respond to relevant pieces of information and ignore others," explains graduate student and first author Lee Lovejoy, who conducted the study together with Richard Krauzlis, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Salk's Systems Neurobiology Laboratory. "Our work shows that the superior colliculus is involved in the selection of things we will respond to, either by looking at them or by thinking about them."

As we focus on specific details in our environment, we usually shift our gaze along with our attention. "We often look directly at attended objects and the superior colliculus is a major component of the motor circuits that control how we orient our eyes and head toward something seen or heard," says Krauzlis.

But humans and other primates are particularly adept at looking at one thing while paying attention to another. As social beings, they very often have to process visual information without looking directly at each other, which could be interpreted as a threat. This requires the ability to attend covertly.

It had been known that the superior colliculus plays a role in deciding how to orient the eyes and head to interesting objects in the environment. But it was not clear whether it also had a say in covert attention.

In their current study, the Salk researchers specifically asked whether the superior colliculus is necessary for covert attention. To tease out the superior colliculus' role in covert attention, they designed a motion discrimination task that distinguished between control of gaze and control of attention.

The superior colliculus contains a topographic map of the visual space around us, just as conventional maps mirror geographical areas. Lovejoy and Krauzlis exploited this property to temporarily inactivate the part of the superior colliculus corresponding to the location of the cued stimulus on the computer screen. No longer aware of the relevant information right in front of them the subjects instead based all of their decision about the stimulus' movement on irrelevant information found elsewhere on the screen.

"The result is very similar to what happens in patients with neglect syndrome," explains Lovejoy, who is also a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC San Diego. "Up to a half of acute right-hemisphere stroke patients demonstrate signs of spatial neglect, failing to be aware of objects or people to their left in extra-personal space." "Our results show that deciding what to attend to and what to ignore is not just accomplished with the neocortex and thalamus, but also depends on phylogenetically older structures in the brainstem," says Krauzlis. "Understanding how these newer and older parts of the circuit interact may be crucial for understanding what goes wrong in disorders of attention."

Arizona Becomes First State To Pass Birther Bill

by Frank James

Arizona continues to lead where so far few other states appear willing to follow.
The state's House of Representatives passed by a wide margin a birther bill Thursday requiring presidential candidates to provide proof they were born in the U.S., becoming the first state to do so. The bill now awaits Gov. Jan Brewer's signature.
It's unclear whether she will sign it, veto it or just let it sit on her desk, in which case it would become law after five days.
The legislation, HB2177, would require presidential candidates to submit proof of U.S. birth. Arizona secretary of state would determine if the submitted documents proved a candidate's citizenship.
  If the candidate failed to produce documentation that satisfied the secretary of state, that official could keep them off the state ballot.
I'm not the only one who wonders if the Arizona law may have a constitutional problem since it arguably runs counter to the "full faith and credit clause" of the U.S. Constitution.
If an Hawaiian official, say, says a certain person was indeed born in that state, then it would seem Arizona would have to accept that statement. The Constitution also says it's up to Congress to decide what the rules are whereby states recognize records from other states.
The Arizona Republic reports that:

Supporters of the bill said it had nothing to do with Obama but is a way to assure Arizona voters that presidential candidates meet federal requirements for the position.

The reporter doesn't tell us if said supporters said this with a straight face or not.

The Republic also has good quotes from a couple of Arizona state lawmakers.

"It's essential that we bring back the integrity to the office," Rep. Judy Burges, R-Skull Valley, said during a recent debate on one of the so-called "birther" measures.

Yes, there really is a place called Skull Valley, an unincorporated rural place of ranches with a two-room schoolhouse.
Another lawmaker, an opponent of the legislation, took the opportunity to not only slam his own state but another that was minding its own business.

Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Phoenix, voted against the bill and said he was embarrassed by his fellow lawmakers.

"Arizona is the first state to pass a birther bill. We look pretty much backward," Gallego said. "You might as well change Arizona to Alabama."

Ouch.

New Views

Blogger.com blogs (such as this one) may now be seen in a variety of dynamic layouts:

Flipcard
Mosaic
Sidebar
Snapshot
Timeslide

Since this blog is not photo-based, some of them aren't quite useful. sidebar or timeslide are my personal favorites.

Happy? Statisticians Aren't Buying It

By CARL BIALIK

Governments, academics and pollsters are hot on the trail of happiness.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has launched an initiative to measure the national mood in a way that isn't captured by traditional economic statistics. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German legislators are looking into similar programs. U.S. government researchers and Gallup pollsters are asking hundreds of thousands of Americans each year how satisfied they are with their lives.

Gauging the Well Being of Happiness Measures

But statisticians' efforts to measure happiness are ridden with uncertainty. Around the world, people tend to describe themselves as happy even when they express many specific complaints and doubts about their lives or their government. Some economists say that even if a reliable happiness test could be devised, it would be risky to craft policy based on a broad metric. Instead, they say, happiness is more reliably reflected in things that are objectively measured, such as income, health and living conditions.

Simon Chapple, senior economist with the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development's social-policy division, has doubts about whether it is possible to measure how happiness is influenced by public policy. "This is an academic field in an enormous state of flux," Dr. Chapple says. "Controversy is still out there."

But other economists see little downside in the efforts. Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics, is an advocate of trying to track happiness as "a basic measure of the progress of a society." Its subjectivity isn't a problem, in his view: "The most important things in life are subjective."

The U.K.'s effort to gauge the national mood shows how nascent the science is. Under Mr. Cameron's direction, the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics is looking at how to assess well being by soliciting feedback on Facebook and Twitter and in more than 100 public meetings around the country. The agency also posted a poll on its website asking how the government might best measure the people's mood. A tweet Friday asked, "Do you like singing and dancing? Could music affect #ukwellbeing?"

The meetings end next month, and the agency hopes to issue a first set of well-being indicators, including self-reported happiness and more objective measures, by the end of 2011.

The U.K. researchers are hoping to produce a measure that would be comparable with other countries. But researchers aren't sure whether national differences reflect true variations in happiness or merely point to linguistic and cultural differences. They note, for example, that Latin American countries routinely score higher than would be expected based on variables such as income, while Asian countries score lower.

Some happiness-survey skeptics point out another potential problem: People are, by and large, fairly happy, or at least say they are when surveyed. For instance, since 2005 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's massive Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System telephone survey has asked respondents, "In general, how satisfied are you with your life?" Each year, at least 92% of respondents have said they are satisfied or very satisfied. That might be good news for the national mood, but it is less helpful for researchers probing what changes to public policy will improve people's well being. If so many people profess to be as happy as possible, there is little room for improvement.

Meanwhile, since 2008 Gallup has been polling Americans nearly every day about their mood, for its Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Through two national elections, a recession, war and natural disasters, the American mood has been fairly stable—"actually one of our most stable items when tracked over time, another reason why you need to look at more than just this one metric," says Dan Witters, a research director at Gallup. The national mood hit a low in February 2009, when job losses were steep; in that month, 87% of Americans said they were happy "a lot of the day yesterday." The peak, in June 2010, was 89%.

Since broad questions about happiness don't appear to do a good job of tracking changes in the national mood, researchers have found other ways to zero in on people's feelings. Gallup finds that when it asks specific questions about enjoyment, stress and worry, a more complicated picture emerges.

Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist who has advised Mr. Sarkozy on happiness measures, says governments and other researchers would be better off collecting and monitoring a range of data, both objective and subjective. "One shouldn't be inspired to have a single number," Mr. Stiglitz says.

American Shame

What We Pay For

U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.

“Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their websites.

As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized.

The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.

This banner was visible on the 84,000 sites



The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statementon their website. “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.”

Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. Asearch on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.

One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involvedin any of the alleged crimes.

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet. Adding mooo.com will produce a different image than picking a random domain (child porn vs. copyright), which confirms the mistake.

Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.

A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made.

Coverage on previous copyright related seizures can be found here, here and here.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/17/freedombox-wall-wart.html

The FreedomBox Foundation is a newly formed charity that has set out to make wall-wart sized, self-contained Linux routers that will provide important anonymizing and networking services, even when the government (or some other entity) terminates or surveils your network access. The project is led by Eben Moglen, formerly of the Free Software Foundation, now with the Software Freedom Law Center.

Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree "platform" technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times.

Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. "Plug servers" and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as "media centers," "communications centers," "wireless routers," and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home.

Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom.

TSA Screenings and Your Rights cheat sheet

<click title for PDF. I am very bothered by the part where is says "Don't resist. Sue them later.">

Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Law: A Modern-Day Scarlet Letter

Download the Crime Against Nature Factsheet (PDF)

Louisiana’s Solicitation of a Crime Against Nature statute, which dates back to the 19th century, is an archaic law founded on moral disapproval of what kinds of sex acts are acceptable. The statute criminalizes sexual conduct considered contrary to the laws of nature because it is nonprocreative.

The Crime Against Nature statute harshly punishes individuals who offer or agree to have oral or anal sex — acts historically associated with homosexuality — for money by requiring them to register as a sex offender upon conviction.

This is the only instance in which an offense that does not involve children, the use of force, violence, a weapon or lack of consent requires registration. Louisiana’s own prostitution statute does not trigger a registration requirement, and this stands to reason, because a simple prostitution conviction also does not involve force, lack of consent, violence, or children.

The inclusion of offenses under the Crime Against Nature statute on Louisiana’s sex offender registry is both discriminatory and unconstitutional, and disparately affects women, people across the spectrum of gender and sexuality, including gay, lesbian and transgender people, African Americans
and poor people.

A Situation Ripe for Abuse and Discrimination
Most of the people convicted of Crime Against Nature by Solicitation law are poor women of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) people who often must turn to sex work to survive.

The statute brands poor women and LGBTQ people with a modern-day scarlet letter and disproportionately affects members of the black community.

In Orleans Parish, almost 40 percent of registered sex offenders are on the registry because they were convicted under the Crime Against Nature statute – despite the fact that their convictions did not involve any force, lack of consent or children. Furthermore, 75 percent of those registered are women, 79 percent of them are African American.

Police officers and prosecutors have complete discretion in applying the statute throughout the entire legal process – from the initial arrest and charges to conviction and subsequent mandatory registration as a sex offender. This creates a situation ripe for abuse and discriminatory enforcement.

An Unconstitutional and Unjustifiable Law
Disparate punishment for the solicitation of - or only offering or agreeing to engage in - oral or anal sex for money more harshly than for solicitation of vaginal sex has no rational or legitimate purpose. In reality, individuals convicted solely for Crime Against Nature who are required to register as sex offenders pose no threat to children or the community.

Until August 2010, even a first Crime Against Nature conviction would trigger a registration requirement. Despite legislative amendments to the law, anyone convicted of a first offense before August 2010 or with a second charge must continue to register on the sex offender registry.

A Modern-Day Scarlet Letter
For individuals convicted under the statute, sex offender registration has a devastating effect on every aspect of their lives, including their rights to housing, employment, travel, identification documents and access to evacuation services in the event of an emergency or natural disaster. This is what one experiences if convicted under the Crime Against Nature statute:

If you are convicted under the statute twice, registration is required annually for 15 years. Any subsequent convictions lead to a lifetime registration. During this 15 year period, you must carry a state ID with the words “SEX OFFENDER” in bright orange capital letters. If you fail to pay annual registration fees, it is likely that you will receive prison time or a $500 fine.

You must mail neighbors postcards notifying them of your name, address, description and your Crime Against Nature conviction – which requires that you spend additional hundreds of dollars every time you move. Your name, address and photograph will appear on a sex offender website, and you may be required to publish your name and Crime Against Nature conviction in the local newspaper. You must disclose the fact that you are registered as a sex offender to your landlord, employer, school, parks department, community centers and place of worship.

It is very possible you will be denied access to homeless shelters and drug treatment because such facilities do not accept sex offenders. And in the case of an evacuation in a natural disaster or other emergency, you will not be allowed to stay with your children or family in a publicly-run emergency shelter, and you must present yourself as a registered sex offender in all emergency situations.

The Crime Against Nature sex offender registration requirement ultimately shuts down access to the services necessary for people to live a productive life and to take care of themselves and their families.

The case of Doe v. Jindal
In February 2011, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Andrea J. Ritchie, Esq., and the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the continued use of the 206 year-old Crime Against Nature statute that brands people who solicit or agree to oral and anal sex as sex offenders. The complaint was filed in the United States District Court Eastern District of Louisiana in New Orleans on behalf of nine anonymous plaintiffs. Some of the plaintiffs have multiple convictions of Crime Against Nature by Solicitation and must register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

The lawsuit alleges that being forced to register as a sex offender because of a Crime Against Nature conviction (which is the only offense requiring registration that includes no element of force, coercion, lack of consent, use of a weapon, or the involvement of a minor) serves no legitimate purpose whatsoever. As such, it is unjustifiable and unconstitutional. CCR further contends that the only reason our clients are registered sex offenders is that they were convicted under the provisions of a 200-year-old statute that condemns non-procreative sex acts and sex acts traditionally associated with homosexuality, solely on grounds of moral disapproval.

The Louisiana Legislature must:
- Stop putting individuals convicted under the Crime Against Nature statute on the sex offender registry;
- Remove Crime against Nature from the list of offenses that require registration as a sex offender; and
- Remove individuals who are currently registered as sex offenders under Crime Against Naturefrom the registry; stop subjecting them to the onerous requirements of the registry law and expunge their registry records

Call on the Justice Department to stop Houston's brutal police culture

A shocking video released last week shows four Houston police officers mercilessly beating a 15-year old burglary suspect while at least eight other officers looked on. Some kicked him repeatedly in the head and legs, others punched his torso — all while young Chad Holley was lying face down with his hands behind his head in surrender.


The officers who beat Holley have only been charged with misdemeanors, and many of the officers on the scene that day are still working as police officers in Houston.

It’s time to demand real accountability for the Houston Police Department — and when we do, it’ll send a clear message to other departments with a similar problem. It starts with the four officers who brutalized Holley, but it can’t stop there. What happened to Chad Holley isn’t merely an isolated incident — it’s the result of a police culture in Houston (and in police departments across the nation) that places little value on Black lives.

Your voice can help change that. Please join us in calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Chad Holley’s brutal beating, and the culture that led to it.And please ask your friends and family to do the same — it’s the first step for reform in Houston and can help shine a light on police brutality in other parts of the country:

Chad Holley ran from Houston police following a burglary — but as soon as he was captured, he immediately stretched out on the ground and put his hands behind his head. But before arresting him, a pack of officers descended on him, stomping, kicking and punching the young man until he blacked out, and leaving him with a broken nose.1,2

Despite this, the officers who beat Holley have only been charged with misdemeanors. All four were charged with "official oppression," while two of them face an additional misdemeanor charge of violating Holley's civil rights.3 Each charge carries a maximum of a year in prison — a light penalty for such a clear abuse of power and violation of the public's trust.

But this is bigger than just the actions of these four officers — Houston Police Department (HPD) has a problem. Misbehavior is rampant among Houston police, with more than 14,000 complaints against HPD officers over the last six years — half of which were upheld. But the real amount of misconduct is likely to be much greater, with much of it not being investigated. Because Black residents distrust the process — and even fear retaliation due to holes in the process — many don't ever file complaints against police officers.4,5

HPD has painted Holley's beating as an isolated incident of misconduct, but that's hard to believe if you watch the video of the incident. Officers attacked Holley simultaneously and without hesitation, as if this kind of violence is routine. There were no fewer than a dozen officers on the scene during the beating, yet HPD leaders didn't learn of the assault until the security video was mailed to the chief of police and District Attorney — all the officers on the scene were silent until then, willing participants in a cover-up.

This speaks to an important reality: Chad Holley's beating appears to be the product of a problematic culture within the Houston Police Department — one where officers don't fear punishment, and where they stick together to hide serious incidents of misconduct. Most recently, this led Houston activist Quanell X, who released the Chad Holley tapes to the public, to announce the release of several more videos of unwarranted police violence.6

The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division can help. They have the power to bring charges with penalties that accurately reflect the heinousness of the Holley incident. This is not just important for justice in Holley's case or for reform in Houston — but for helping to send a signal to other departments across the country. The Department of Justice can also investigate the entire police force, and force changes to the culture that allowed this happen.

If there's enough public outcry, we can push the DOJ to take a hard look at Chad Holley's case. That's why it's important that as many of us speak up as possible. And after you do, please, urge your friends and family to do the same. It takes just a moment:

South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

A bill under consideration in the Mount Rushmore State would make preventing harm to a fetus a "justifiable homicide" in many cases.

— By Kate Sheppard

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers."

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Jensen did not return calls to his home or his office requesting comment on the bill, which is cosponsored by 22 other state representatives and four state senators. UPDATE: Jensen spoke to Mother Jones on Tuesday morning, after this story was published. He says that he disagrees with this interpretation of the bill. "This simply is to bring consistency to South Dakota statute as it relates to justifiable homicide," said Jensen in an interview, repeating an argument he made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. "If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion." Jensen also aggressively defended the bill in an interview with theWashington Post's Greg Sargent on Tuesday morning.

"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers," says Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers. Since 1993, eight doctors have been assassinated at the hands of anti-abortion extremists, and another 17 have been the victims of murder attempts. Some of the perpetrators of those crimes have tried to use the justifiable homicide defense at their trials. "This is not an abstract bill," Saporta says. The measure could have major implications if a "misguided extremist invokes this 'self-defense' statute to justify the murder of a doctor, nurse or volunteer," the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families warned in a message to supporters last week.

The original version of the bill did not include the language regarding the "unborn child"; it was pitched as a simple clarification of South Dakota's justifiable homicide law. Last week, however, the bill was "hoghoused"—a term used in South Dakota for heavily amending legislation in committee—in a little-noticed hearing. A parade of right-wing groups—the Family Heritage Alliance, Concerned Women for America, the South Dakota branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, and a political action committee called Family Matters in South Dakota—all testified in favor of the amended version of the law.

Jensen, the bill's sponsor, has said that he simply intends to bring "consistency" to South Dakota's criminal code, which already allows prosecutors to charge people with manslaughteror murder for crimes that result in the death of fetuses. But there's a difference between counting the murder of a pregnant woman as two crimes—which is permissible under law in many states—and making the protection of a fetus an affirmative defense against a murder charge.

"They always intended this to be a fetal personhood bill, they just tried to cloak it as a self-defense bill," says Kristin Aschenbrenner, a lobbyist for South Dakota Advocacy Network for Women. "They're still trying to cloak it, but they amended it right away, making their intent clear." The major change to the legislation also caught abortion rights advocates off guard. "None of us really felt like we were prepared," she says.

Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor at George Washington University who frequently testifies before Congress about abortion legislation, says the bill is legally dubious. "It takes my breath away," she says in an email to Mother Jones. "Constitutionally, a state cannot make it a crime to perform a constitutionally lawful act."

South Dakota already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and one of the lowest abortion rates. Since 1994, there have been no providers in the state. Planned Parenthood flies a doctor in from out-of-state once a week to see patients at a Sioux Falls clinic. Women from the more remote parts of the large, rural state drive up to six hours to reach this lone clinic. And under state law women are then required to receive counseling and wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure. (Click here for an interactive map of abortion restrictions.)

Before performing an abortion, a South Dakota doctor must offer the woman the opportunity to view a sonogram. And under a law passed in 2005, doctors are required to read a script meant to discourage women from proceeding with the abortion: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." Until recently, doctors also had to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she had "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that was protected under the Constitution and state law and that abortion poses a "known medical risk" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." In August 2009, a US District Court Judge threw out those portions of the script, finding them "untruthful and misleading." The state has appealed the decision.

The South Dakota legislature has twice tried to ban abortion outright, but voters rejected the ban at the polls in 2006 and 2008, by a 12-point margin both times. Conservative lawmakers have since been looking to limit access any other way possible. "They seem to be taking an end run around that," says state Sen. Angie Buhl, a Democrat. "They recognize that people don't want a ban, so they are trying to seek a de facto ban by making it essentially impossible to access abortion services."

South Dakota's legislature is strongly tilted against abortion rights, which makes passing restrictions fairly easy. Just 19 of 70 House members and 5 of the 35 state senators are Democrats—and many of the Democrats also oppose abortion rights.

The law that would legalize killing abortion providers is just one of several measures under consideration in the state that would create more obstacles for a woman seeking an abortion. Another proposed law, House Bill 1217, would force women to undergo counseling at a Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) before they can obtain an abortion. CPCs are not regulated and are generally run by anti-abortion Christian groups and staffed by volunteers—not doctors or nurses—with the goal of discouraging women from having abortions.

A congressional investigation into CPCs in 2006 found that the centers often provide "false or misleading information about the health risks of an abortion"—alleging ties between abortion and breast cancer, negative impacts on fertility, and mental-health concerns. "This may advance the mission of the pregnancy resource centers, which are typically pro-life organizations dedicated to preventing abortion," the report concluded, "but it is an inappropriate public health practice." In a recent interview, state Rep. Roger Hunt, one of the bill's sponsors, acknowledged that its intent is to "drastically reduce" the number of abortions in South Dakota.

House Bill 1217 would also require women to wait 72 hours after counseling before they can go forward with the abortion, and would require the doctor to develop an analysis of "risk factors associated with abortion" for each woman—a provision that critics contend is intentionally vague and could expose providers to lawsuits. A similar measure passed in Nebraska last spring, but a federal judge threw it out it last July, arguing that it would "require medical providers to give untruthful, misleading and irrelevant information to patients" and would create "substantial, likely insurmountable, obstacles" to women who want abortions. Extending the wait time and requiring a woman to consult first with the doctor, then with the CPC, and then meet with the doctor again before she can undergo the procedure would add additional burdens for women—especially for women who work or who already have children.

The South Dakota bills reflect a broader national strategy on the part of abortion-rights opponents, says Elizabeth Nash, a public policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute, a federal reproductive health advocacy and research group. "They erect a legal barrier, another, and another," says Nash. "At what point do women say, 'I can't climb that mountain'? This is where we're getting to."

The Best Questions For A First Date

First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.





This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid's database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:


What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?


Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you're looking for, we'll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they'll be useful to you in the real world.
First—define "easy to bring up"


Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what's okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:


If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?


do u own 3 or more dildos in your room?


Do you hsve a desent job?


I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!


So, instead of judging each question's first-date appropriateness subjectively, I turned to statistics. I decided our candidates were the ones that (a) most people were comfortable discussing publicly, and (b) were mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn't just guess. I sliced OkCupid's question pool like this:




That blue rectangle is our highest-quality, least-invasive questions, and we next examined each of them for interesting correlations. (If you're interested in knowing more about the above graph, you can drop-down an explanation here, complete with an interactive scatter plot that took me forever to make.)


Now let's get right to the results. This is the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep:


Okay, if you want to know...
Will my date have sex on the first date?
Ask...
Do you like the taste of beer?
Because...


Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is thesingle best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date.




No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met. Sadly, this is the only question with a meaningful correlation for women. For men there are a few others:



predictive question

implied odds

of first-date sex



Q: In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?

'yes'⇒83%



Q: Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?

'yes'⇒82%



Q: Could you imagine yourself killing someone?

'yes'⇒82%



First, I have to give guys credit for logical thinking: in the post-apocalypse, THERE ARE NO SECOND DATES.




Also, I will never look at fingerless gloves the same way again.


If you want to know...
Do my date and I have long-term potential?
Ask your date (and yourself!)...
Do you like horror movies?
Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?


Of all questions appropriate to a first date, the three listed above were the ones couples most often agreed on.
Here's how we know...




When someone deletes their OkCupid account, they have these 3 questions correlated best to a real-world relationshipthe option of giving us a reason, and if that reason is 'I met somebody on OkCupid,' they can give us their significant other's username. Many hundreds of people a day go through the trouble of doing this, so we've compiled an excellent dataset of real-world couples. Agreement on these three questions correlated best to an actual relationship.


In fact, 32% of successful couples agreed on all of them—which is 3.7× the rate of simple coincidence. These questions as a trio even out-performs OkCupid's top three user-rated match questions.




Turistas: the best date movie of all time?


If you want to know...
Do my date and I have the same politics?
Ask him or her...
Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?
Because...




We were very surprised to find that this one question very strongly predicts a person's ideas on these divisive issues:


Should burning your country's flag be illegal?


Should the death penalty be abolished?


Should gay marriage be legal?


Should Evolution and Creationism be taught side-by-side in schools?


In each case, complexity-preferrers are 65-70% likely to give the Liberal answer. And those who prefer simplicity in others are 65-70% likely to give the Conservative one.


This correlation is for a nationwide dataset; it won't be as useful in places where one ideology is much more prevelant than the other. For example, in New York City there are lots of people who like simplicity and yet have Liberal politics.


If you want to know...
Is my date religious?
Ask...
Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?


If your date answers 'no'—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.


As someone who is not himself a believer, I found it rather heartening that tolerance, even on something trivial like this, correlated with belief in God, although I should've figured out that religious people are okay with small mistakes. Next to intelligent design, what's a couple typos?


It's also nice when two completely independent datasets corroborate each other. Last summer, we analyzed the profile text of half a million user profiles, comparing religion and writing-level. For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level.

religious Stupidity Venn

São Paulo: A City Without Ads

In 2007, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil's most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known on one hand for being the country's slick commercial capital and on the other for its extreme gang violence and crushing poverty, São Paulo's "Lei Cidade Limpa" or Clean City Law was an unexpected success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city's conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab.

As the driving force behind the measure, mayor Kassab quelled the rebellion from the advertising industry with the help of key allies amongst the city's elite. On many occasions, Kassab made the point that he has nothing against advertising in and of itself, but rather with its excess. He explained,

"The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution."

Since then, billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses have been eliminated at breakneck speed. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal, and strict new regulations have drastically reduced the allowable size of storefront signage. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape.

One sore loser in the battle was Clear Channel Communications. Having recently entered the Brazilian market, the corporation was purchasing a Brazilian subsidiary as well as the rights to a large share of the city's billboard market. Weeks before the ban took effect, Clear Channel launched a counter-campaign in support of outdoor ads, with desperate slogans that failed to resonate with the masses: "There's a new movie on all the billboards – what billboards? Outdoor media is culture."

Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful of billboards standing, the city, now stripped of its 15,000 billboards, resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. While it's unclear whether this cleanup can be replicated in other cities around the world, it has so far been a success in São Paulo: surveys indicate that the measure is extremely popular with the city's residents, with more than 70 percent approval.

Though materialism and consumerism, along with gang violence will continue to pollute the city of São Paulo, these human dramas may at least begin to unfold against a more pleasant visual backdrop.

– David Evan Harris

†

†

On The Media's Bob Garfield interviewed Vinicius Galvao, a reporter for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper, about São Paulo's ban on visual pollution.

I've seen photos of the city, and it's amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did São Paulo look like up until the ban took place?

Vinicius Galvao: São Paulo's a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn't even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.

And now it's amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.

BG: No writer could have [laughing] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city's eyes?

VG: São Paulo's just like New York. It's a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.

And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops.And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it's a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.

BG: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn't it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?

VG: No. It's weird, because you get lost, so you don't have any references any more. That's what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city's got now new language, a new identity.

BG: Well, cleaning up the city's all well and good, but how do businesses announce to the public that they're open for business?

VG: That was the first response the shop owners found for this law, because the law bans billboards and also even the windows should be clean. Big banks, like Citibank, and big stores, like Dolce & Gabbana, they started painting themselves with very strong colors, like yellow, red, deep blue, and creating like visual patterns to associate the brand to that pattern or to that color.

For example, Citibank's color is blue. They're painting the building in very strong blue so people can see that from far away and they can make an association with that deep blue and Citibank.

BG: Now, the city has said, having undertaken this effort, it will eventually create zones where some outdoor advertising will be permitted. Do you expect São Paulo eventually to just revert to its previous clutter?

VG: Not to revert to previous clutter, but I think like very specific zones, I think they're going to isolate the electronic billboards in those areas, in the financial center. I don't think they should put those in residential areas as we had before.

BG: Now, the advertising industry is obviously not happy about this. They're complaining that they're deprived of free speech and that it's costing them jobs and revenue. But is there anyone else in São Paulo who's unhappy about this? Tell me about the public at large. What's their view?

VG: It's amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they're strongly supporting that. It's a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they're agreeing with the ban. What they say is that we should have created criteria for that to organize the chaos.

BG: Vinicius, thank you very much for joining us.

VG: Thank you so much.

BG: Vinicius Galvao is a reporter for Folha de São Paulo.

Immigration officer fired after putting wife on list of terrorists to stop her flying home

By Steve Doughty
 
Sacked: The UK Border Agency official was fired for gross misconduct, having placed his wife's name on a list of people not allowed into Britain

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is 'not conducive to the public good'.

As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects' list during a vetting inquiry.

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

The incident is likely to raise new questions over levels of efficiency in the UK Border Agency, the organisation formed nearly three years ago by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to take over all immigration controls.

It has been criticised for poor performance by the Parliamentary Ombudsman and has suffered its share of humiliating incidents - for example the incident 19 months ago when an illegal immigrant escaped from the channel tunnel port at Folkestone by clinging to the underside of a bus carrying Border Agency staff.

The Agency is charged with putting into operation the Coalition's policy of reducing numbers of workers from outside Europe allowed into Britain.




Prime mover: Jacqui Smith set up the UK Border Agency three years ago, but these latest revelations have led to calls for tighter vetting

A spokesman said: 'We expect the highest levels of integrity. Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated and we always take action swiftly where we find members of staff who have abused their position.

'On the extremely rare occasions where this occurs, the strongest action is taken.'

The officer in the latest incident to come to light was employed by a unit maintaining watch lists.


He is understood to have worked at the Agency's headquarters at Lunar House in Croydon, South London.

His wife visited family in Pakistan but when she tried to return to Britain she was not allowed onto the aircraft. Airline and immigration officials refused to explain to her why.

She was forced to remain in Pakistan for three years until her husband's manipulation of the suspect list came to light.

He is understood to have applied for a promotion that would have meant a higher level of security clearance.


During the vetting process the name of his wife was discovered on the suspect list, to the surprise of security staff.

When questioned, the officer confessed to his alteration of the lists and was sacked.

Flash Projection